Monthly Archives: September 2013

A while back, I decided to ask Candide to stop commenting on this blog because I considered most of his comments to consist of trolls and the dissemination of FUD.

6 months ago, a correspondent argued that I should drop this ban. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Candide did the same via Twitter. Since then, I’ve thought about it and concluded that while I can do whatever I want on this blog, it was quite petty and ultimately rather pointless to persist in preventing Candie from commenting.

So I’m sorry. I’ve revised my comments guidelines and will be happy to see comments from Candide, should he ever choose to grace us with his presence again.

UPDATE: A mail server issue has also been resolved. This was preventing notifications about new comments being sent.

These are just some notes I scribbled down the other day. I’m not a statistician (as will become clear very soon*) but I did want to dig into the opinion poll results a little more and try to work out how they could translate to an actual referendum.

NB – I base everything on the idea that the same electorate would vote as in elections to the Catalan parliament. It’s not clear if this would actually be the case. E.g. if legal foreign residents or 16 & 17 year-olds were allowed to vote, that could well skew things significantly. I’m not sure of the chances of either of those happening but they have been hinted at previously.

*If anyone better qualified than me can find critical errors or malpractice in my shaky workings, please let me know: I’d like to be better at this sort of thing.

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Catalonia independence. Poll (#CEO): YES 55,6%, NO 23,4%, ABSTENTION 15,3%. In Catalonia, the referendum is still forbidden by Spanish gov.

Even if ALL Don’t Knows voted No, the No vote would only have 41.4% of the vote, compared to 58.5 (a 17.1 % point lead to the Yes vote). If only half voted No, and half voted Yes, the balance would be:

Yes: 65.75

No: 34.15

This is a 31.6 % point lead to the Yes vote.

Accordingly, it appears that the Yes vote would win a referendum on Catalan independence by something between 17 to 40 percentage points, the lowest lead representing a situation in which every voter who responded ‘Don’t Know’ ended up voting No, which strikes me as unlikely.

So who are the fascists? The hundreds of thousands of citizens who turned out today to peacefully call for Catalan independence, or the Falange and Democracia Nacional supporters who interrupted an event in Madrid?

This is, at least partly, the fruit of the PP’s campaign against social coherence in Catalonia. A mendacious call for unity while sowing division is the PP’s strategy, backed up by their mates in C’s.